What we suffer is emotional. Healing is an emotional process we call grieving, And Health is an emotional place. It’s a simple concept. The journey through it, far less so.
When we worry about the future, it’s not the actual business meeting that is painful, it is our anxiety that controls us.
When a loved one or a pet dies, we honor them with a funeral, a deed done for the living, not for the dead. It’s for us and our pain, because our dead will never know.
“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”
We have access to, and the ability, to largely control the emotions that we suffer. Healing is an Emotional Process we call grieving.
As I’ve mentioned in just about everything I’ve written, Grieving is the process of experiencing the feelings, roughly described by the stages, Denial, Anger/Anxiety, Bargaining, Sadness, and Acceptance.
We have to allow ourselves to remember or experience the objective episode of what happened. Once described as “making conscious what is unconscious.” More simply stated, “allowing ourselves to remember what we have not yet allowed.” I.e…The illicit painful emotion of fear or anxiety.
If we make it about what somebody ‘did or didn’t do’, the same feeling is likely to be expressed as anger. And anger always destroys. When people experience anxiety or anger, recalling chapters of their lives, they usually avoid it, or act out on it, stopping the process of gaining insight and excavating denial.
You probably understand by now there are thousands of ways to skirt the thorough experience of our pain.
Bargaining is a way to describe what we do with painful feelings in order to not have to directly feel them. Guilt is an example. It sucks to carry the feeling “If only I had done this. If only I hadn’t done that.”
Feelings of inadequacy or worthlessness are. as well. “If only I were more intelligent, successful, beautiful…” It’s a painful way to live with unresolved pain. Coping with the pain of anxiety by drinking or drugging or monitoring what everyone else is doing around me, just plain hurts.
Coping with emotional pain in these ways at one time was the best solution available. It really was. But that defense mechanism in our current life doesn’t make sense, doesn’t apply, and gets us into trouble.
Health is an emotional place. Once we really allowed ourselves to access and remember episodes that occurred in our story, we then have insight and are no longer in denial. The joke used to be “Insight and a quarter will buy you a cup of coffee.” Meaning that insight alone is not healing or worth very much. Now we like to say “Insight and six dollars will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.”
We must bear through the terror or the rage that is evoked by those memories. The most effective therapy for post traumatic stress disorder is exposure response prevention therapy. This is about the therapist and the patient holding a safe environment to allow the patient to gently titrate the fear for anxiety of what they experienced.
While insight is the necessary first step, experiencing the anxiety and allowing it to be processed is greatly relieving in and of itself.
Anxiety or feelings of fear and anger are literally defenses against pain. The pain must be felt.
While we are aware of the anxiety or fear that first hit us, when you read the story, it summarily was painful. Consider Denial and Anxiety as the heads of a Hydra. The heads can be cut off, but they keep growing back and often multiply.
The heart of the hydra, when talking about emotional suffering, is pain or sadness. You may feel disappointment, letdown, or hurt. Of course, no living creature wants to experience pain, and will avoid it however they can.
Remember, “What we resist persists,” and there the pain and sadness remain. Many more heads of the hydra will grow to protect against it. We are somehow blessed with the ability to embrace, experience, and purge our pain through crying and sadness. There is a calm that comes after the storm of crying or sobbing. “I had a good cry and I slept like a baby“.
Understand that Health is an Emotional Place. Having the source of the pain removed, like removing the thorn from an abscess, we no longer need to utilize Denial and can have insight to how things really were, and most importantly, how things really are.
We can ‘Be Here Now’.
Anxiety or fear never helps. Being more calm makes us more resilient and more effective in every way. Leaving us free of the defenses that guard against the sadness, such as always worrying what others think, drinking too much, being irritable…
No longer needed are the symptoms of major depression; guilt, decreased self-esteem, and loss of feeling pleasure…we communicate by emotions, conscious, or otherwise.
People feel it when they’re in the presence of a stressed out angry person. So we put up our defenses and run for the hills, making it worse. Free of the fear and the defenses we carried, and free of the pain we fear experiencing it again, we can then be open to forming relationships with friends and loved ones. This offsets intolerable loneliness.
And finally you reach Acceptance, a term that represents forgiveness, contentedness, gratitude, and hope for a new day….Or Emotional Health.